Are implicit dual-licensing agreements inherently anti-open?

[Alex Bligh]

Michael,

> I believe I now understand.
>
> - You want to prevent anyone else from making proprietary versions that
> leverage the ID's investment in the code, except as (possibly)
> proprietary plug-ins to a shared API.
>
> - You want to reserve the right to make proprietary versions of the main
> codebase to the ID.

Yes(-ish).

However, we don't want to restrict it to plug-ins. Equally bugfixes,
straightforward functionality additions etc. - sadly not everything
is GPL'able.

> So far so good. This can be accomplished very easily by licensing the
> main code under the GPL (for example) and adding a special exemption to
> allow proprietary plug-ins to use the common API.

(or pretty much equivalently, just use the LGPL).

The problem with that approach is that it does not allow bug-fixes
feature additions etc. to the main program to be used by the ID.

Equally, it's not really about allowing proprietary plugins (as it
happens, my client doesn't care about the licensing of plugin stuff
and would happily put a "use whatever license you like on plugins"
exception in, but I know others are more fussy).

> However, you also want the ID to be able to incorporate community
> modifications to the main application into the proprietary version.

Yes

> Ordinarily, this would be accomplished by the contributor assigning or
> licensing their modifications to the ID under terms that would allow
> that, possibly for some additional consideration.

Yes.

> But you want to make this a condition of the license. For a number of
> reasons, even if the resulting license were determined to be OSD
> compliant, I don't think this would work. At all. Being able to roll
> other people's work into your proprietary offering is a *privilege* not
> a right.
...
> In this case though, the modification in question gets assigned back to
> the ID with no guarantee that the change will make it into the free
> codebase at all.

Incorrect. That is the second half of 3.3. It expressly provides that
the ID only gets the license to include the code in his proprietary
version, if it makes it into the free version.


Alex